Shattered Wig Press, publisher of The Shattered Wig Review and many fine books of poetry and prose, has been going down the rabbit hole of culture since 1988. We are based in Baltimore, Maryland, home of Poe, Billie Holiday, John Waters, David Simon, murder, pavement surrealism and liberationist absurdity.
We are always looking to publish the gritty, mischievous, magically absurd, brutally poignant or simply put miraculous communication.

Shattered Wig #28

Coming In November!

Monday, July 5, 2010

Honeymoon

Pictured at left is our little Vortex grill transported to Chincoteague Island so that Lady Rio could whip up on some steaks. And indeed she did. This was on Monday night, our second night there, and soon after these roaring charcoal flames got going storm clouds brewed and in about an hour the overbearing 100 degree days collapsed into the gentle mid-'80s and stayed there.

On the night of July 3rd when the Island was celebrating the 4th, we walked a few blocks from our cottage to a nearly deserted park by the water and watched from our seats on a picnic table three different neighborhoods set off fireworks. Two other couples of varying ages and horniness sat at scattered picnic tables and the cool breezes felt like silk.

Usually fireworks strike me as the clowns of holiday entertainment. Something that everybody is supposed to enjoy and be enthralled by, but for me - and I think a lot of other people, a big old bag of whiff. But on this night with Everly beside me catcalling spanish sailors and taking big wet slurps from her 40 I was able to relax and be spellbound by the upward spiraling electric spiderwebs in the sky.

Once again I was reminded on this trip that apparently if I bike, swim in the ocean and lay around reading on the beach all day I can feel very healthy. My legs felt like vibrating meat tuning forks. Of course at that point it was the final night of our trip, I'd had my last swim while the suave white-haired gentleman set up in a mini-tent behind me played Brazilian and classical music on an acoustic guitar, and the next morning we'd be rolling back to Baltimore praying the car tires would make it.

Luckily there were two flea/antique markets to hit on the way to cushion our return to savage civilization. The first held mainly bootleg versions of bad mainstream dvds, used mom jeans and a tattooist(!) - "good place to get hepatitis," my beloved remarked - but the second, "Blue Crow", had some very cool books at a booth that was going out of business. A beautiful hardback of Breakfast of Champions in pristine, colorful unfaded jacket, a first complete English translation of Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia-Sexualis, a couple of Freemasonry books (hello wackos) and a first edition of Capote's In Cold Blood.

It was a Chincoteague trip of many firsts. My first marriage and honeymoon, of course, and that was splendid - almost as special as seeing a Kid Rock Kid shaped like a '50s rocketship, the kitchen sink bulky baroque kind that was always after Buck Rogers, wearing a Confederate flag bikini. Or as sweet and tender as the elderly gent who looked like Tiny Tim if Tiny Tim had pursued accounting and occasionally had a glass of some sort of juice in the morning along with his fistful of uppers, downers, screamers, marrow pellets, paw paw beans and Ladybugs, having the time of his life with a neon green surfboard.

Of all the treasured keepsakes I have from this physical and emotional journey - the speaking oyster shell, close up photos of a glossy ibis and a snowy egret getting it on, the bloodied cloth Mennonite cap found next to a dented rolling pin in the Mister Whippie parking lot, I think the scarification along the back of my legs that were exposed below my bermuda shorts caused by Everly beating me with wire hangers whenever I tried to turn the air conditioner above 62 degrees will always be my favorite. Like a gory severed head rolling down a thirty foot stone Aztec pyramid, my altered legs will assure a decent crop is harvested by our love.

I will never forget the sweet little girl who was staying in the cottage across from ours with her aunt. Each morning when the black squirrel was cavorting in the willows, the circus of butterflies caught once again in the spell of the Russian Sage bush, my muffled sobbing on the back porch would attract the attention of the youngster as she created internet portals for her various C.E.O. friends from the Cartoon Network.

"Why do you cry so, Mr. Borgnine?" she would softly ask me, having once seen "McHale's Navy" on her grumpy old grandfather's television and now confusing me with the classic old character actor who was built from tubers.

"I'm not crying Portia," I would say, "it's just my allergies. And please stop pressing against the porch screen, Miss Everly will hear you and my allergies might just get far worse. Here, please be a dear child and take this balled up old note to the sheriff at T's Corner, I think he'll understand."

Upcoming Mole Suit Choir Shows

Out Now From Fell Swoop!

Mattress In Alley, Raft Upon The Sea

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Long Live Blaster Al Ackerman

Astrally Reassigned March 17, 2013

Raymond Chandler As Martian

The Origin of Paranoia As a Heated Mole Suit Going Into Third Printing

My mutant baby walks again! 52 pages. "I have read The Origin of Paranoia as a Heated Mole Suit by Rupert Wondolowski. It is as good as the title would mandate being to warrant having such a bad ass title on the cover. The poems here are amazing and weird and funny, and for $9 you can’t really ask for much more. Get this quick.." - Blake Butler, HTML Giant

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Reviews

The Origin of Paranoia As a Heated Mole Suit - by Rupert Wondolowski
"HTML Giant Reviews Mole Suit!
My sparkling new baby has its first review, before the publication party even. My noose lays damp on my book covered bed and for that I hail Adam Robinson and Publishing Genius Press.
New from PGP: The Origin of Paranoia as a Heated Mole Suit
Posted by Blake Butler @ 2:28 am on December 16th, 2008 (Permalink)
I have read The Origin of Paranoia as a Heated Mole Suit by Rupert Wondolowski. It is as good as the title would mandate being to warrant having such a bad ass title on the cover. The poems here are amazing and weird and funny, and for $9 you can't really ask for much more. Get this quick." - Blake Butler/HTML Giant

Normal's Gold Plated Night At The Golden West

Nathan Bell, Michael Lambright & Justin Being Suave

Chris Toll Resonating At Wig 28 Party

Shattered Wig Review #28 Is Out!

After a two year love hiatus, Shattered Wig is back with an effulgent 66 page issue bursting with brilliant writing by folks like Stephanie Barber, Chris Toll, Amelia Gray, Michael Kimball, Adam Robinson, Blaster Al Ackerman and John Colburn and edgy "Slancys" by Professor Derrick Buisch. The full color cover by Rocco Randy George McWilliams Superfly III is worth the $6 price alone. Contact us here for a copy or buy one in person at Normal's Books & Records, Atomic Books or Minas. $12 will get you a two issue subscription shipped to your door.

"Don’t let the DIY look of the publication mislead you. Here, you’ll find sophisticated literature, with allusions to the visual poets, surrealist, automatic writing and stunning poetic lines like Stephanie Barber’s “one conducts electricity or symphonies, big bands or / trains or themselves with restraint.” There is plenty of worthwhile reading material in here all for only six dollars." - What Weekly

Shattered Wig Review #28 - $8 ppd

Shattered Wig Night Tinklers Publication Party

Chris Mason of the Tinklers

The Elements by The Tinklers

Available Now for $10.00 postage paid from Shattered Wig Press

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Corn & Smoke by Blaster Al Ackerman

Corn and Smoke: Stories, Performances, Things by Blaster Al Ackerman 88 Pages, perfect bound, $12 postage paid from: Shattered Wig Press 425 E. 31st St. Baltimore, Md. 21218 Al Ackerman is the Mark Twain of the 21st Century, with a strong dose of Phil Dickian time warp and a heavy reading of every sci-fi pulp of the 40s and 50s ever printed. Not to mention the wry wit of a Perelman. Ackerman is serious about language and presenting the myriad onion layers of the universe, but he chooses for his subject the margin dwellers, the avatars, all the while with great empathy for the lost souls of The New Age. This collection brings together some of his out of print classic stories like "What My Bible Did For Me" and "The Crab" with new brain teasers like "The John Eaton Recommendations" ("little gauzy winged things fascinated him") and "Ten Finger Earl".

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Baltimore Magazine Award

Best Literary Magazine 2009

Shattered Wig Review #27

This issue boasts front and back covers by Baltimore's recent MICA graduate who has gone super nova in the last year or so - Erin Womack. Seemingly possessed by Star Wars, Weird Old Ladies With Mysterious Crystals and Persian Folktales that don't exist, Erin's art has been popping up everywhere in multiple mediums - children's books, cassettes, DVDs, storefront windows, shirts, hand printed posters, paintings, drawings. Other young Baltimore upstarts included are the poets Lauren Bender, Justin "Wifehair" Sirois, Jamie Gaughan-Perez, M. Magnus (from Alexandria, VA, actually, but he sure spends a lot of time in Baltimore), Stephanie Barber and Adam Robinson. For us they write in the sweet stew of language that blends post-surrealism, eternal absurdity, pathos despite itself and echoes of the ever looming LANGUAGE. 27 is also chock full of most of the damaged geniuses you've grown to love or despise: Mok Hossfeld, Blaster Al Ackerman, John M. Bennett, Eerie Billy Haddock and Andrew Goldfarb. And I defy anyone to not love the poems of John Colburn. His "Human Being In Celestial Mode" is the one thing that gave me hope in the new year. All that plus feverish cartoons, collages and drawings.

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The Whispering of Ice Cubes by Rupert Wondolowski

52 pages perfect bound. Prose and poetry by the editor of The Shattered Wig Review. $8 postage paid. "Rupert Wondolowski's gritty work is macabre, mischievous, playful, and irreverent, approximating a fusion of William Kotzwinkle, Ron Padgett (circa Great Balls of Fire), Richard Brautigan, and Charles Bukowski. These 39 pieces are delivered with the power and polish of French surrealism, and yet they are particularly American in nature, informed by a sort of seamy-underside-of-society perspective, presumably influenced by Wondolowski's residence in Baltimore, Maryland, stomping ground of two other great American surrealists, John Waters and Edgar Allan Poe. This is not some dour, pretentious art-for-art's-sake surrealism, nor is it some tepid experimental workshop riffing, but rather the work of a highly accomplished and unique writer with a twisted sense of humor." - Mark Terrill in Rain Taxi

About Me

Author of The Origin of Paranoia As a Heated Mole Suit, The Whispering of Ice Cubes, Humans Go Outside to Hurt You, Shiny Pencils, The Incredible Sleeping Man and Nightmare Rubber. Editor of The Shattered Wig Review and Press.